External Antenna Makes Massive Difference For Me!!!

Read through several posts on the T-mobile Home Internet Facebook group you mentioned, Bond, and one stuck out for me in particular, which is pretty much the polar opposite of your experience with an external antenna. A person installed an external antenna and lost their connection completely and doesn't know what they did wong. One person suggested their sim card might be a little out of position.

Okay, I know that's a worst case scenario, especially if they can't get their connection back without exchanging their gateway, but another reason I can add to the pile of reasons it is taking a risk. My main reason for not getting it is that I'm used to crawl speeds on DSL so the 200 down average I get now with TMHI is blazing.

There was one post on the Facebook group I liked especially of a guy getting speeds in the 200s and very happy to ditch his 1G speeds with Cox at $180/month. Realistically, unless you have like 5 kids all downloading games or watching different 4K TV programs, or a real need for speed because of frequent work-related uploading/downloading, the speed part alone isn't all that important between getting 200 and getting 600.

However, I can see how an external antenna might help some people get better latency and maybe even fewer disconnections, if that is their problem, and that's part of why I would go for it if it were a simple plug-in, although for me my latency is fine (under 50 on the ping test), jitter is usually between 3 and 5 which is very good at my distance. And after the 1609 update, my minor disconnection problem, maybe once every other day, has disappeared. Haven't gotten a single disconnection in over three weeks since the update. And of the past disconnections, all were reconnected in the 2 minutes it took to restart.

The Facebook group is good though, because I found a lot more comments there about, for example, people with faulty gateway issues, what their problems were, and if they were resolved with a new gateway. Again though, I've been fortunate with my gateway, as I notice no overheating issues or other issues.

I think you are probably right about their lack of testing gateways before they recycle them. With electronics though, sometimes problems don't surface until they've been on for a while. If the problem with the gateway is that it starts malfunctioning after it has been on for one hour, the person testing it would not find that issue. I don't even know if they have the means of testing something like this without having to find problems just as a user would.

I'm sure that Nokia is doing fine on this deal but I see TMHI as entering a period of exponential growth in this service. It is revolutionary for rural users who were stuck on slow speeds, as well as people who are sick of having their fees jacked up by cable and other providers. The thing that stops it from exploding into millions of users in a month is the reliability, and the variability of people's experiences with it.